New Media

As the world witnesses the completion of the latest heaven-scraping tower to grace the skyline of a city of golden dreams, a tiny, niggling question arises: why isn’t Dubai getting raked over the coals by the same eco-warriors that like to trash Canada for environmental crimes against humanity?

To illustrate the paradox, just imagine that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper takes a break from — well, whatever he is doing while parliament is prorogued — in order to make an unexpected announcement: “We will build a city of the future in Yellowknife!” he shouts with a wild look in his eye. The hastily-assembled reporters move as a unit towards the back of the room and look to the exits.

“Now, I know the Al Gore crowd won’t like this, but the oil sands development in Alberta will double its production capacity to fund this gleaming northern metropolis. Not to worry, taxpayers — to ensure that this city is built as fast as possible while getting the best value for your money, Yellowknife will be designated as a special economic zone. The developers will be able to employ slave, er, ah, inexpensive foreign workers not subject to Canadian labor laws. Oh, and did I mention we’re going to build a commercial and residential tower more than twice the size of the Empire State Building?”

Sounds utterly ridiculous, right? The only question is which group would tear Harper apart with their bare hands first: the David Suzuki Foundation, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, or his own caucus. The environmental damage alone for building a huge city in a fragile and largely frozen ecosystem would be obvious to a small child. Add robust oil sands development into the mix and there’s a good chance the United Nations Security Council would authorize military intervention to topple the Harper regime.

A Cautionary Tale for Urban Planners
So why is this scenario actually playing out in Dubai with so little attention paid to the environmental damage it is doing to the planet? Just so we’re clear about the scale of the problem in the world’s least sustainable city:

Dubai consumes more resources per capita than any other country in the world, including the US. The city is a monument to indulgence, luxury, and, thus far, utter disregard for ecological footprint or sustainability: for example, Dubai currently consumes a whopping 250 million gallons of water per day (around 97% of which is desalinated sea water) to sustain a city of less than 1.5 million people.

Of course, all those seawater desalination plants require tremendous amounts of energy, which comes from the burning of fossil fuel, namely oil. One would think that a desert kingdom with such challenges would try to conserve some of its precious resources. Instead, the scorching hot desert city plans to literally evaporate its wealth by building the world’s biggest water fountain:

The fountains, which has yet to be named, will be capable of shooting water over 150 metres into the air – the height of a 50-storey building – and stretch over 275 metres – the length of two football fields. The $218 million project will be 25 percent larger than the iconic fountains at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas.

The 828 meter-tall Burj Dubai building will only add to the city’s troubles. It essentially added a city on top of the existing city. All the Vancouver city planners in the world — and Dubai certainly tried to get all of them — won’t be able to fix the basic problem: they built a decadent, modern city in a place that lacked enough natural resources to properly provide for a small medieval town.

Sour Grapes and Sweet Crude
Some will characterize my analysis as a bitter, sour-grapes rant of a patriotic Canuck motivated by the demotion of the CN Tower to second-best status. Others will point out that cities in North American are filled with skyscrapers — why can’t the Middle East aspire to this kind of prosperity and engineering feats?

But let’s remember that the West built up most of it’s cities at a time of cheap energy and no general consensus on the threat of global warming. We may have developed and achieved high levels of prosperity at a high cost to our environment. But until the last few decades (and for most of the population, until the last few years), our society did not understand the potential link between our industrial development and environmental degradation. Now that most of us are clear on the connection (and the dangers), we now aspire to incorporate environmental sustainability into everything we do. We are horrified by urban nightmares of places like Los Angeles and Atlanta. Freeways are out, bike paths are in. We may still fail most of the time in achieving sustainable cities — even Vancouver doesn’t yet come close to being carbon-neutral — but at least we’re aiming for a greener future.

As for Dubai, they have access to exactly the same data on environmental degradation and climate change that we’ve got, but the simple fact is that they don’t care. To oil shiekdoms like the United Arab Emirates, phrases like “peak oil” don’t frighten. They conjure dollar signs in their eyes. All the better to help them get rich and have some fun.

Prosperity and fun are are not intrinsically terrible things. But when unaccompanied by sustainable planning (which at this point, would entail massive forced depopulation of Dubai and other parts of the UAE), these all-encompassing aims are terribly irresponsible. They’re bad for Dubai citizens. They’re also potentially dangerous for the rest of the world.

In the absence of a technology revolution involving renewable resources like solar energy, places like Dubai will be overtaken by the desert, probably sooner than later. The difference is that when Las Vegas finally goes down, the citizens of that doomed mirage will be able to take haven in other parts of the USA. When Alberta dries up, parched cowboys will flee to the rainy west coast.

But when Dubai goes down? Will their people run to the other sun-blasted parts of the Arab world when their own ecosystem has been used up? Or will they come here? This brings up the bigger picture problem: is the West destined (and obligated) to become a life raft for cities and nations that destroyed their own ecosystems?

The Wealth of Nations and the Movement of Peoples
As the Copenhagen summit demonstrated, the Third World wants the “rich and decadent” West to transfer massive amounts of wealth, no questions asked, so that they can keep running their countries into the ground. Many Westerners are quite happy to hand over these suitcases full of unmarked hundred-dollar bills out of a misplaced sense of guilt towards countries that have in most cases been the victim of their own internal corruption, political intransigence and fanaticism.

These wealth transfers will occur, likely starting in 2010, if the frenzied one-upping promises of politicians at Copenhagen is any indication. So we will continue to invest in the environmental degradation of what we might call rogue nations, ecologically speaking.

It’s unclear whether places like Dubai will be the eventual recipients of this climate change prevention fund. It’s hard to imagine Canadian taxpayers forking over millions so that Dubaians can keep their desalination plants running, so that they can keep operating their water slides. Then again, no one will be keeping track…

But that’s not where the story ends for places like Canada. Eventually, no amount of cash transfer will be enough to support artificial nations that have literally pissed away their wealth and built their cities on a foundation of sand. That’s when we will be asked to take in people from Dubai and other arid parts of the world — again, no questions asked, since that would be cruel and clearly racist. Will our society, already coping poorly with a stream of immigrants from certain parts of the world where “Canadian values” are poorly understood, be able to cope with the coming flood?

Can we simplify this problem? Imagine, in the course of gaining some temporary measure of prosperity, a man you know destroys his own house and damages the property of his neighbors. Are you ethically bound to give him shelter? Is your decision based on generosity, or the idea that if you deny him shelter and force him to sleep rough, he will instead attempt to break into your basement?

In the bigger picture, when it comes to dealing with the waves of climate refugees, these questions will not remain hypothetical for long.

Where Are the Eco-Warriors?
The well-heeled public relations squad for Dubai has certainly earned their keep. In all the coverage of the biggest building in the world, I saw no condemnation of this engineering monstrosity by the usual green pundits. In fact, the only criticism I’ve seen leveled at Burj Dubai is that owing to the economic downturn, it may not have been timed right in order to guarantee full occupancy.

Are the greens worried about “offending” certain ethnic sensibilities? Perhaps they don’t want to be tarring Dubai’s powers-that-be with the same brush as the one they use to smear colonial, or so called neo-colonial Western nations. Hitting Dubai over it’s big useless tower standing in the bleached desert just doesn’t give the same sense of satisfaction as beating up Canada over the oil sands, or even rising star China over building a new coal plant every week.

The Burj Dubai hides in plain site from environmentalists and gets a free pass this week. Meanwhile, we’ll see if a news cycle can go by without some environmental organization slamming Canada as the real planet killer.

Dubai’s Wild Wadi Water Slide. Dubai’s Vaunted Wealth Goes Down the Drain. So Much for Sustainability

Sometimes, to really appreciate what we’ve got here in Vancouver, you have to go to some distant hell-hole to see how badly other human beings have really messed things up.

In my latest Cityview column for Granville Magazine, I decided to take the “shooting-ducks-in-a-barrel” approach and looked at the awful state of public transit in Los Angeles. As I noted on a recent trip, the car-clogged freeways of that part of the American nation are a testament to bad planning predicated on an unsustainable assumption (a lie, really) of long-term access to cheap energy.

Los Angeles has invested billions of dollars to pick away at the problem with subway lines and new clean-energy buses. But the fact is that despite these efforts, transit ridership on the whole hasn’t moved in decades.

One can no more fix Los Angeles’ traffic issues with transit than you could fix a badly infected broken arm with a band-aid. There’s just too much of a legacy of expensive road infrastructure to maintain and a persistent attitude among the locals that they are “entitled” to their cars — and the “loser cruiser” is for the poor (This attitude contrasts not just with Vancouver but L.A.’s polar opposite, New York City, where Wall Street traders in suits and briefcases rub shoulders with working class Joes on the packed subways).

My look at Los Angeles certainly wasn’t meant to slag our American cousins. We certainly have our own mutated versions of this unsustainable model: Calgary and most other prairie cities, have spread out in the absence of natural geographic limits to growth, taking on all the unfavorable characteristics of “Edge cities” — lacking distinct neighborhoods, utterly dependent on ring roads and freeways, and ineffective mass transit.

The question is what these cities will do with all of this legacy of expensive, unsustainable infrastructure. Will taxpayers simply keep on subsidizing these urban disasters? Will these urban wastelands just be abandoned (or at least vastly depopulated) a few decades from now? I expect both of these things to happen in succession. The only question is how much longer taxpayers are willing to put up with subsidizing failure.

Recommended reading: I’ve seen one possible future for Vancouver and it’s scary

Also: Calgary Transit Sucks

Vancouver has not been spared the economic blow-up that has affected the rest of the planet. This week, budget realities came up against citizens fearful of losing city services — and for some, their jobs.

Vancouver residents come out in force to an emotionally charged public city budget meeting, begging the question, ‘what are our priorities?’

Some city services, like parks and libraries, are seen not just as services, but as essential to our civic space where citizens can gather and livability is defined. When the money tap gets cut off, watch out.

Read my complete article at Granville Magazine, Something’s Gotta Give.

For more insight on the budget debate at Vancouver City Hall, I highly recommend City Caucus’ coverage, Council budget meeting brings out hundreds, and high emotions.

Child poverty is still a big problem in British Columbia. Indeed, our child poverty rate is the highest in the country, and 150,000 kids are affected. It’s hard to imagine so much misery in a society that is one of the wealthiest and healthiest on Earth. Then again, why imagine? You only have to wander over to Vancouver’s downtown eastside to see how people are living on the fringes.

April Smith of Aha Media, 24 and living in the downtown eastside, provides a powerful and moving description of her own challenges in growing up in poverty in Vancouver. You can listen to her full interview on the CBC here.

My hastily done transcription provides the following highlights:

I had parents that were really abusive. There was never enough money. I faced a lot of cruelty. I have a lot of scars on my body. There are more on my soul. It’s something that still affects me today.

I remember being in elementary school and being teased because I didn’t have the proper outfit. I couldn’t go on field trips because we couldn’t afford it. We didn’t have enough food in the house… I remember sleeping in the cold.

It’s been a long journey. I’ve been homeless for many years. I remember sleeping on streets, standing in the food lineups. I’ve been on own since I was 12. I was just trying to survive, standing in lineups, trying to find warm shelter, warm clothes, struggling with my own image, my own self esteem.

Sometimes it meant trying to find protection and shelter in different ways that I never thought I would ever get into. That’s including aligning myself in different relationships. Sometimes with poverty comes violence, trauma and abuse towards women and it can affect the rest of your life.

Learn more about Aha Media’s new-media hyper local citizen journalists, including April Smith, here. They’ve got an incredible story, and this dynamic team helps our community tell incredible stories.

April Smith of Aha Media interviews Jeffrey in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside

It’s pretty clear that BC is trailing the pack when it comes to minimum wage. At $8 per hour, we’re dead last across Canada. That’s a shame and it needs to change. But ideally, BC’s business class and political leadership will be able to set a foundation where it’s essentially irrelevant.

BC Federation of Labour’s Jim Sinclair calls the minimum wage situation a disgrace. It’s hard to argue the point.

Given our cost of living, minimum wage in Vancouver should at least be higher than in my original home town of Winnipeg. In Manitoba, minimum wage is set at $9 per hour. My fellow Vancouverites will howl in disbelief as I inform them that a friend of mine in Winnipeg bought a four-bedroom house there a few years back for about $70,000. That’s not a typo — there’s really not a zero missing. Sure, my friend’s spacious place is a bit of a fixer-upper, and it’s not exactly central, but try buying a four-bedroom house on the boundary of Vancouver and Burnaby for ten-times that purchase price. Good luck. That’s just one indication, but Metro Vancouver also has the highest rental rate in Canada. The point is, it’s expensive to live here.

Should someone flipping burgers or delivering pizzas naturally have the scratch for a down-payment on a house virtually anywhere in the country? Probably not. No one is “entitled” to live in Vancouver’s west end or Toronto’s ritzier burbs. Sure, some low-wage earners have to work two or three jobs to pay the rent and put food on the table for their growing families. Well, that’s life. We don’t have a caste system in Canada. The class system here is arguably even more permeable than in the USA, so-called land of opportunity. And there are certainly government programs making it easier for anyone to get the education and training they need to do what they want with their life. Given that, what is a fair minimum wage?

I don’t want to argue the merits of a particular level of minimum wage, somewhere between “enough for someone living with their parents to buy comic books and cigarettes” to “enough to support a small family and keep the fridge stocked with beer”. Frankly, I have no idea what constitutes fair in a society where the top level-CEOs make as much in the first 15 minutes of the year as I do all year.

But frankly, I don’t really want our politicians and business leaders in BC to spend all that much time on minimum wage. Top it up by a buck or two and be done with it until the coffee servers in Osborne Village once again start looking uppity.

Instead, I’d like to hear more about how this province is going to be positioned to train and produce the knowledge workers required to boost our fortunes in coming years. The recession is a temporary bump in the global process of a flattening international economy. North Americans need to become much better at building and sustaining a knowledge economy based on technological innovation, since we know where all the manufacturing and low-skilled labor has moved over the past decades.

If BC is successful in promoting this kind of success to augment its traditional resource-extraction based industries, minimum wage will become irrelevant. It seems natural that the so-called “green economy” will be a big part of this, as there are already plenty of companies in BC building capacity in the fields of alternative energy and more sustainable products. When the economy is roaring again, minimum wage will once more be the preserve of high school students and ambitious but unskilled laborers training at night for future opportunities.

Jim Sinclair calling for an increase from BC’s $8 minimum wage — in 2006